


The Wish of These Hands

by shiromori



Category: Angel Sanctuary
Genre: Canon Related, F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:52:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiromori/pseuds/shiromori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story focusing on the complicated relationship between Kira/Nanatsusaya/Lucifer, Setsuna, and Alexiel, with a dash of the Madhatter thrown in just for kicks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Anagura

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a story in two parts. The first part takes place during vol. 7 of Angel Sanctuary directly after Setsuna's soul returns from Hades and is placed accidentally into the body of Alexiel. Large hunks of dialogue are stolen directly from the manga, and spoilers, of course, abound.

  
  
**Anagura**   
  


 

Kira thought of blood and blue roses as he walked through the empty halls of the Gehenna palace. Too many secrets and surprises with the haze of old memory were turning up around every corner, and without knowing quite why, Kira sensed that jester's hand in it all. The way she had looked at him as if she knew him, with a smile that promised pandemonium... More and more, ever since Setsuna had become directly involved in this heavenly mess, Kira felt as if he were being assaulted by feelings and images of a life he scarcely remembered living. There was much more at work here than the ambition of the evil clan of Anagura. And now Eishera had been killed...

He had to find Setsuna.

Flinging open a door, Kira called out, "Setsuna! You here?" and was relieved to hear a voice, not Setsuna's, but just as longed for, answer, "I'm here."

Setsuna stood with his back to Kira, framed in the doorway, facing a long mirror. In one hand he held the heavy silken mass of Alexiel's dark hair, and in the other he held a knife. He looked over his shoulder at Kira with his same careless old smile that was strange on a woman's beautiful face. "Hey, sempai," he said. "You came at the perfect time. Can you help me out? This hair is too long. It'll get in the way on my trip to Yezirah. Could you help me cut it, Kira? Just take it all off."

That wealth of hair spilled between Setsuna's fingers, over his bare shoulders and down his back. He'd gathered it up in one fist at the nape of his elegant neck and set the knife there, trying clumsily to saw through. "Jeez..." he muttered. "Sure is hard to cut..." Soft, curling strands of hair already littered the floor about his bare feet. Alexiel's high boots and the heels that had given Setsuna such trouble were gone. There was only smooth skin, long graceful legs and delicate feet. Kira stood in shock, mouth half open to protest while more and more hair drifted to the floor as Setsuna continued to hack at it ineffectually with the knife. "D... don't..." Kira whispered, and then, "Don't, Alexiel!" and he reached out almost unconsciously to grasp the hand that held the knife, to pull it away from its butchering work.

Kira's grip on Setsuna's wrist was harsh, and Setsuna let the knife fall to the stone floor with a clatter that was loud in the suddenly tense silence. "Alex...iel?" Setsuna whispered, and his eyes - Alexiel's eyes, clear as glass - held something that Kira didn't understand. Setsuna wrenched his arm away, and Kira let him. He turned his back and retreated against the far wall. Kira watched him lift Alexiel's body up onto the shelf of a candlelit alcove, shoulders hunched, legs drawn up, and it was unquestionably Setsuna in that body. Alexiel would never be so vulnerable. "You don't want to cut it... because it's Alexiel's hair?" Setsuna said. Not quite a question. "But I don't like this hair. It's heavy and annoying and pretty. Every time I see it, it reminds me of Alexiel's existence." He looked up at Kira, and Kira could see Setsuna's pleading there in that beautiful face that had always been so cold and remote. "Is it the same for you?" Setsuna asked softly. "What happened in the past that I don't know about?" He hesitated. "Did you... love Alexiel?"

His eyes held Kira's, expecting, needing an answer, but Kira had none to give. He was struggling to reconcile it - that face and that body, that husky feminine voice speaking Setsuna's confusion. "I don't know what happened between Alexiel and you. That's because I thought it had nothing to do with me," Setsuna said finally, perhaps realising that he wouldn't get an answer to his question. But he was not as indifferent as he pretended to be. That voice, Alexiel's voice which had always been so controlled, wavered with emotion. "Since entering this body, old memories and feelings have been attacking me. Sometimes I can't tell if they're Alexiel's memories or mine. I know things I couldn't know, and feel things I shouldn't feel... It's driving me crazy! That's why I hate it," he said. "This face and this body... even this hair. It's too heavy for me. I wanted to cut it all off."

Setsuna hugged one knee to his chest and rested his head there. He was oblivious to the way his hunched shoulders made his bodice gape over the breasts he was unaccustomed to having or how his drawn up leg pulled the hem of his short dress askew and revealed the hint of lace panties that he should not, absolutely should not have been wearing. "I know cutting the hair or even changing my face won't do anything. This will still be Alexiel's body." He said so, but he had no concept of what he was saying. "No matter what, I'm me! I can't become the Great Alexiel," Setsuna declared, and he swung his legs down. His back straightened, and there was Setsuna's defiance surfacing at last, the one trait that, undeniably and despite all differences, he shared with Alexiel.

Perhaps it was that which finally shook Kira from his daze. "Great?" he said bitterly. "That woman?" Oh, she was ever that. That beautiful and bloodied flower that bloomed on the battlefield in a mountain of corpses... Even though she was such a terrifying woman... that long and shining hair dyed with blood took his breath away. Kira reached out a hand then to touch it, the aspiration of centuries to feel that heavy silken hair under his own fingers, to feel it slide softly over his skin.

 _When the fighting is over, could you have one wish, Nanatsusaya, what would you wish for?_

Kira let himself caress Alexiel's beautiful face that now wore Setsuna's shock. His fingers touched those full, open lips. "I thought... if she would ever give her body to me... that I wanted to touch it."

 _If had a body of my own, if I had arms I would hold you with them... I would touch your beautiful hair._

"That's what I thought," Kira spoke softly, lips all but touching that cool hair, that soft cheek. His arm was around Setsuna's bare shoulders, and Setsuna's bare legs were spread around his hips, pressing against him, smooth skin against rough denim. If Setsuna tried to close them, he wouldn't be able, but likely he didn't even realise that he should.

"She was said to have given everything to battle, and yet that beautiful hair was proof that she could not completely give up being a woman." Kira grabbed a handful of it as Setsuna had done, and let it spill between his fingers. "I wanted to cut it off," he said, and he wrapped long strands around his fist. "I'll tell you the truth, Setsuna... I hated Alexiel." His grip on Alexiel's hair became fierce. "That woman knew my weakness. She used my secrets against me and forced me to fight."

 _I am the only one who can wield you._

 _I will not free you now. You and I are forever, Nanatsusaya..._

"And yet she broke our agreement and fell into the hands of those in heaven. I can't forgive that." No. I can't forgive her.

Setsuna's hand brushed Kira's side as if he wasn't sure whether or not he should be pushing Kira away. He was paralysed with indecision, and his shallow, rapid breaths - perhaps he was even a little frightened - pressed those soft breasts to Kira's chest. Kira's hand fell to the swell of Alexiel's hip, and he felt that body jump almost imperceptibly. "I've chased after your soul through the years so that you would keep your promise to me." Kira's fingers hooked under the hem of Alexiel's short dress, and he slid it up her leg, and Setsuna said nothing. Kira popped the button of his jeans, and slid down the zipper with a metallic shiver of sound that made Setsuna shiver as well, but still, he said nothing. "I raped you," Kira whispered in a soft tone that belied the harshness of his words. He pushed those incongruous panties aside with impatient fingers. "... and I killed you."

With one forceful movement, Kira pushed inside Alexiel's body, and finally, Setsuna made a sound, a breathy woman's cry that wavered between pain and perhaps something more subtle still, and Kira thought it was unbecoming of them both, boy and angel. Alexiel's thighs tightened reflexively about his hips, but it was much too late now for decorum. Kira barely pulled back before pushing in again with a sharp breath of his own, and her body gave way to him.

His first thrusts were hard and angry, and they drove Setsuna back against the wall where Kira held him pinned between cold stone and his own unyielding body. Setsuna's hand pushed insistently at him now, scrabbling at his shirt, perhaps to push him away. But Setsuna was silent, completely silent save for the little involuntary gasp he made each time Kira drove into him, and he held to Kira with that indecisive touch to his chest. They did not look at each other. Setsuna stared over Kira's shoulder at the mirror behind them, maybe seeing himself and maybe not in the woman who threw back her head and wrapped her long bare legs around Kira's denim-covered hips. And Kira, eyes closed, let his hands see for him, describing the soft curves of the woman he'd served for a hundred lifetimes, and listened to the quiet and self-conscious little moans of the boy he'd loved for less than the fullness of one.

Setsuna's face was damp where he tucked it against Kira's neck. With sweat, with tears, Kira didn't know and had no thought to spare for it. Setsuna was murmuring something over and over. Kira could feel him form the syllables on his skin. Kira... Kira... Kira... Or perhaps he only wanted it to be. Pulling Alexiel's body hard against his, he forced them together as tightly and as deeply as he could, and he breathed a shuddering sigh into the silky curtain of Alexiel's dark curling hair as he came with her delicate fingers knotted in his shirt and her soft thighs locked around his hips.

Slowly, slowly Setsuna released the grip of his legs, and lowered them around Kira's body, still pressed close, and Kira withdrew with far more care than he'd shown earlier. Setsuna made no protest, but his lips compressed momentarily, and his eyes squeezed shut. Probably, it was uncomfortable for him, his body unused to it, to say the least. His hands did not let go of Kira's shirt, and Kira could feel them trembling ever so slightly.

He refastened his jeans. Setsuna was watching him with wide eyes - her eyes that had never held such an expression - and it unnerved him, made him realise what he had done and to whom. "Yes..." he said, voice low and angry. Angry at himself, and most of all at Setsuna for making him feel. "I hated you," and he saw Setsuna flinch. "That's why I killed the whore who was your previous incarnation." His hand slid from Alexiel's hair and covered her delicate white throat. He felt Setsuna swallow under his palm. "I killed you out of rage."

Setsuna drew back under pressure from that hand, but not in fear. "You're lying..." he said with a certainty he could not possibly feel.

"I'm not lying. I haven't changed at all," Kira replied with bitterness that wanted to be truth. "Taking innocent lives means nothing to me."

"Kira!" Setsuna exclaimed, but the shock was not directed at him. Kira's gaze followed Setsuna's and he saw an uncertain shape shimmering in the mirror behind them. He turned immediately, and Setsuna slid down from the stone shelf beside him.

"I have something to show you that might interest you, Messiah," the apparition spoke, and Kira recognised that androgynous voice at once. It was that meddlesome emissary of hell who called herself the Madhatter. In the mirror, her indistinct form was replaced by a different picture. A body was laid out on a stone bier, pale and peaceful and composed, with a crystal dagger thrusting up from a heart that no longer beat. Setsuna's body. A crowd seemed to be gathering around it, milling and muttering ominously.

With a gasp of alarm, Setsuna took two steps towards the mirror as if he might reach through it and pluck his own body to safety, but he quickly turned. Before he could run, though, Kira made a grab for him and caught his arm. "Setsuna, you can't go alone." He didn't like the thought of Setsuna facing down a room full of demons - even minor ones - by himself, but Setsuna jerked free of his grip and gave him a hard look that was so full of Alexiel's imperious command that Kira let him go without a thought, and he took off at a run down the hallway, no doubt in the direction of the chamber where his helpless body was under siege.

"He doesn't really need to know your identity, does he?" the mirror spoke again behind him, and Kira didn't bother to turn. He had no desire to play games with the jester.

Her arms - no apparition, but solid and real - went around his shoulders, and her long painted nails, like talons, curved into his skin. Her thin chest pressed up against his rigid back so that he could feel each button on her coat front. "Just keep things as they are. Then you still have a reason to stay by Alexiel's side." There was a silent space, and he felt her warm, poisonous breath against his cheek. "Am I wrong?"

Galvanised by her mockery, Kira strode angrily away from the mirror and her embrace. "Keep your filthy hands off me," he said coldly.

Soft and knowing laughter followed him. "I see... He has a mysterious charm, the Messiah."

With a snarl of rage, Kira spun, drawing Shiranui in the same movement, and brought the blade sharply against the mirror and its mocking occupant. Mirror and frame shattered with an unmusical chime, and each shard seemed to hold the jester's smiling face.

"No sense of humour..." she tsked. "Not now.... Not ever."

Kira ground broken glass under his boot.


	2. Sheol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This second part takes place later during vol. 11 when Alexiel temporarily regains control of her own body in Sheol, and confronts Kira/Nanatsusaya. Large hunks of dialogue are stolen directly from the manga, and spoilers, of course, abound.

**Sheol**

 

The world was a swirl of darkness in which there was no up or down. Setsuna floated in it, dazed and disoriented, and wondered if it was possible to die twice. It seemed hardly possible that he could have survived the chaos of the Demon Lord's failed wedding.

 _Setsuna..._

The voice startled him, indistinct and seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "Who's there?" he called out, or thought he did. He felt as if he were muffled by a thick blanket of fog, and he could not be sure of his own body. "Who's calling me?" He thought first of Kira, but thoughts of his friend sent an unpleasant jolt of memory through him of a cold and handsome face, shrouded in darkness and entirely too familiar.

Why did the Demon Lord look exactly like Kira-sempai?

 _Why? You ought to know..._

No. Now that he heard it again, it couldn't be Kira. It was low and husky, but clearly a woman's voice. "Who are you?"

 _It's all right... The time for you to wake is almost at hand, so just rest for now... This is the river Lethe. Its waters are the waters of oblivion... I will borrow its power for a little while..._

 

************

 

When a woman's body rose from the river, Kira experienced a relief so profound, he nearly buckled with it, but he stood on the bank and watched Setsuna wade to shore. For the Messiah to have drowned in hell before even beginning his revolution would have been God's cruellest joke yet. He only hoped that the body of an angel as powerful as Alexiel had protected Setsuna from the Lethe's insidious effects. Drenched from head to toe, Alexiel's long hair was streaming, and her gown clung to her wet skin. Hiking up the dripping hems that wanted to stick to Alexiel's legs, Setsuna stepped onto the sandy bank, but the measuring gaze he gave Kira then was strange. "What is it?" he said. "Don't tell me that you fail to recognise me... As cold as ever, I see, Nanatsusaya."

At Kira's look of shock, Setsuna gave him a smile that was uncharacteristically hard-edged. "No... by now you should have begun to gradually remember... And so, lusting for the truth, you came down to this land. To discover the truth of your identity, who your soul belonged to before you were reborn as Nanatsusaya?"

Kira's eyes narrowed. He took a step back, and his hand strayed unconsciously to the hilt of Shiranui. This wasn't Setsuna, easygoing and straightforward, and so unalienably human even in angelic form. This woman... was something else entirely.

Setsuna uttered a throaty woman's laugh which, coming from Alexiel's lips, made Kira shiver. "What's the matter? Didn't you always want to touch my hair?"

 _If had a body of my own, if I had arms I would hold you with them... I would touch your beautiful hair._

Kira's mouth opened to reply, but no sound came out. The sight of this woman, the sound of her struck him utterly dumb. It couldn't be... Alexiel!

She stalked towards him one slow step at a time, her small feet leaving deep and precise imprints in the damp sand of the riverbank. "Well, you have it now, don't you? Your own body... a pair of hands to embrace me with..." She was all but embracing him now. Scant inches separated them. Her delicate hands curled around the collar of his coat, and tightened into fists. "Or would you still have me live my life as a goddess of war like in the olden days? Even though I would have been perfectly happy just to be an ordinary woman..."

Kira thought: you could never be that. When he spoke, his voice was a shadow of itself. "Whatever you're talking about, I don't understand any of it... I'm just a lost soul living in a sword." And it was truer than he liked to think. After eleven years, his time as Kira Sakuya was coming to an end, and he feared he'd been too changed by that gentle human boy. Too many things now made no sense to him. There was too much he didn't know or remember about himself, and too many people who did. And Alexiel was too good at making him feel lost.

She pressed her wet body against him, and Kira felt the cold water of the Lethe seep into his clothing and touch his skin with the chill of hell, and a moment later, felt her warmth spreading through him. "What?" she whispered. "Would you not even warm a poor, wet, shivering woman?" Her lips brushed the underside of his jaw. "You really are a cold man... Lucifer."

 _What is that name to me? ... I don't know it._

Kira took hold of her shoulders, meaning to push her away, but her skin was smooth and cool under his hands, and her damp hair so soft against his fingers, and he found that he could not do it. He knew, too, that she had known he would not. He bore her down onto the sand, covering her body with his own, and she let him do it. His hands pushed the flimsy straps of her gown down her arms, and bared her white breasts while she watched him. A dark and ruinous brand marred that perfect skin so that no one would ever forget what she was. Fallen angel. Kira ran his fingers over it, tracing the lines burned into her flesh, and then he bent his lips to her, laving his hot tongue over a nipple peaked with cold.

Alexiel pressed up to him, arching languorously into his touch, and she pulled her arms free from her dress so that Kira could push it down to her waist, baring more skin to his ministrations. Her cool hands crept under his coat, and she pulled the buttons from their holes. And then, just as Kira had lavished the mark of her sin, her wandering fingers touched the crimson stain on his chest, the sign of their covenant sealed in her brother's blood. Never forget that he too was marked. I own you, that touch told him wordlessly, and Kira pushed back, pressing her into the sand under him.

Alexiel smiled her predatory smile again, and she raised her hips to him, crooking her legs as they parted for him as if she had always done it. Kira ran his hand up her leg from knee to thigh, brushing away water-stained skirts and clinging sand. Her skin was chilled, but the secret place between her legs was warm, and Kira covered it with his hand. Alexiel exhaled softly when his fingers moved, sliding wetly over sensitive, fever-hot flesh, and her fingers bit into his shoulder. His thumb described slow circles that Alexiel's hips matched, and her dark lashes fluttered against her flushed cheeks. I own you, he said with his touch, and Alexiel moaned.

She didn't ask - Alexiel never did - but her nails raked down Kira's chest, and she pulled at the waistband of his jeans, tugging open the button and fumbling blindly with the zipper. Her small hand cupped the hard length of him through the heavy fabric. It was all Kira could do to push her hands aside so that he could free himself, and when he did, she took him in hand again, her sword-callused fingers rough on his sensitive skin, but indescribably good. Slowly, she guided him inside her, and he sank in deeply with a breathless moan.

Alexiel wrapped her arms about Kira's shoulders. Her hands fisted in the material of his coat, and she rose up to meet him as he began to move. Kira dug his fingers into the damp sand as if to ground himself... because this was not the whore as he had known her before, but Alexiel, the Great Angel herself, whose only lover was War. Her body arched under his, strung tightly as a bow, and there was nothing yielding about her. They struggled with and against each other, reaching towards a release that neither had ever, in all their many lives, quite grasped.

 _It's always the same. Whichever eon it may be, we always just pass each other by... just barely miss each other. Strive as we might for a moment of tranquility, it is always the same. We are no more than dolls sculpted by God, and all that awaits us at the end of the road is to kill each other until the remaining one draws their last breath... our destiny._

Kira never took his eyes from Alexiel's face, but he caught the hand that held the astral blade before it plunged into his unprotected back. He forced her arm down and pinned it to the sand. She bucked underneath him, and the movement sent a shudder of pleasure through him - he was still inside her - but she could not throw him, and he restrained her with an arm across her vulnerable throat, threatening breath and life.

Neither of them moved.

"You haven't changed a bit since the old days, have you? Cruel woman. What is it, Alexiel? No longer have any use for me?"

Her smile was pitiless and unrepentant. "Seems like you've started to remember all sorts of things..."

Kira withdrew. He sat back on his heels, and allowed Alexiel to slide out from under him. "Indeed," he said coolly. "Such as the fact that from the very start, the only thing on your mind was to use me... and that all those eons ago, when I lived as that black-hearted sword, my true self sealed... when you helped me back then... you did it knowing that, originally, I was the soul of the Lord of Hell, didn't you? And that's why now, when I began to awaken, you tried to kill me, using your own body as bait." He looked up at her, calmly combing out her damp hair with her fingers, clothing already put straight. His own was still in disarray. "Why? Why do you risk your life? Why do you degrade yourself so?"

Alexiel regarded him coldly, the Great Angel again, callous and aloof. "To lift the Creator's curse, the curse that was placed on Rosiel and I when we were born. Neither he nor I shall ever escape this hunger... unless we destroy the Creator. All my incarnations on earth... I have been watching over every single one of them, waiting, and Setsuna is the one. He is the Organic Angel I have been waiting for, the true Messiah." For the first time, a soft note crept into her voice. Even Alexiel, it seemed, was not untouched by Setsuna's charm. "He is still very young and inexperienced... and so I thought to remove a man who, in the very near future, will stand in his way." Her eyes met Kira's. "For you will undoubtedly awaken as the Lord of Hell, and when you do, you will stand before Setsuna as his mightiest enemy."

"You understand, don't you?" Alexiel said as though she were addressing a child, and she caressed his cheek with mocking tenderness. "I am not the goddess of victory that people are waiting for... just a marionette struggling to sever the strings from which she is dangling. And what amasses beneath my feet is a mountain of corpses. I am the Angel of Death... Now," she whispered, "demon lord in the making... can you hear it? This pulse... it is the sound of Setsuna's heart. He is coming back to life. It's time to say goodbye, Lucifer... or perhaps Nanatsusaya." Her lips ghosted over his skin. "Love me as you will... but it has no meaning. None at all."

Kira caught her body as it sagged, her eyes empty and her limbs once again slack in death. Her soul... Setsuna's soul... had fled. He cradled her in his lap, her limp form feeling strangely light as though the greater essence of her was gone.

He sensed the presence before he saw it; a splash of brilliant colour in the murky, poisonous air, a creature whose delicate beauty had no place in hell. But beauty, as he could attest, was deceptive. The Madhatter had sent her emissary, and the butterfly conveyed her androgynous voice, "Seems like the Messiah's true body has successfully come back to life, and Alexiel is once again no more than a beautiful corpse." The mocking edge was there even as the jester addressed the man she claimed was her lord. "Up on the surface, one has prepared a magic circle leading straight to Anagura. May this please your majesty."

Kira was finished with hell and its malicious angels. He stood, holding the body of his mistress in his arms. He kissed the soft lips that still held the ghost of warmth, but he could not breathe life into them.

 _Alexiel..._


End file.
